Art can be about your imagination, and you don't have to be an adult to be an artist!

Did you know that a famous artist who has sold a painting for a million dollars is a teenager who began her artistic career at the age of 8?

Alexandra Nechita was born in Romania, and came to the U.S. when she was very small. She loved to color with markers and crayons when she was young, but what she loved most was to draw her own pictures and color them in. She'd draw for hours and hours, and her parents actually worried that she was drawing too much. They bought a set of oil paints for her when she was in elementary school and hung her paintings all over their house. When she was eight, her art teacher found out that she had dozens of paintings at home, and made arrangements for her to hang some of them in a local library. She sold her first painting at the age of eight.

Now she is in her late teens, is attending college to study art, and has sold paintings for as much as a million dollars. People have compared her work to the Cubist work of Picasso and Braque because she breaks things up into geometric shapes, and to Chagall because her paintings are imaginative and dreamlike.

Alexandra makes paintings about how her hair gets tangled when she washes it, or about playing in the yard with her little brother, or about going fishing with her Dad, or about how she thinks countries should try to get along with each other. She makes art about the things that are important in her life.

The most surprising thing to know about Alexandra is that when she was in 3rd and 4th grade, her classmates thought her artwork was weird. They thought her artwork wasn't very good because it was not realistic. She would put too many fingers on a hand, or not enough toes on a foot, and her classmates felt that she didn't know how to make "good" looking art! They must have been shocked when years later she became famous for these "weird" paintings because they never thought she was one of the "good artists" in class.

Vincent Van Gogh painted over 800 paintings in his lifetime, and as far as we know, he was able to sell only one of those paintings, for about $30.00. Now his artwork is some of the most valuable in the world. He never lived to see how popular his "weird" style of painting became. Vincent Van Gogh and Alexandra Nechita liked doing their art so much, they didn't care what others thought about their paintings. They never tried to copy other artists just to make their artwork more popular. What makes their art so valuable is that it's different from everyone else's!

The Moral of the Story

The lesson we should learn from Alexandra's story (and from Vincent Van Gogh's life, too) is that if you like making artwork that is different from everyone else's, you should not feel bad at all. There is not just one "right" way to make art! Both of them spent a lot of time painting hundreds of painting, so their artwork became even better as time went on.

A masterpiece is a work of art that is different from anything else that has ever been done before, that may have been so far ahead of its time, it took people awhile to accept it, and that years later people still find meaningful and enjoyable. Lots of the artwork we now call masterpieces were not popular at the time they were made. True artists refuse to listen to other people's opinions of their work, and people should learn not to say bad things about someone else's artwork just because they think it's "weird."

Art is not just for the people who draw or paint realistically. Artists who use their imagination make masterpieces, too. Alexandra makes her art not to become rich and famous, although that has happened to her, but because she loves doing it. Finding what you love to do and doing it your way ---that's the key to success.

A note about the 4th grade drawings: these were made with Crayola Gel FX markers on dark paper. As far as I've been able to tell, these markers are not yet sold in stores. The effect is like nothing else, and some parents asked me where to get them. I bought them through art supply catalogs, such as Sax and School Specialty Suppy; they are also available by mail through Crayola's web site.

See more of Nechita's artwork at
www.nechita.info

Sprinkle the Joy of Peace by Alexandra Nechita

Examples of fourth grade artwork inspired by Alexandra Nechita